Dance of being

the poetry of Peter Redgrove

Neil Roberts

pp. 87-102

in: Gary Day, Brian Docherty (eds), British poetry from the 1950s to the 1990s, Basingstoke, Palgrave Macmillan, 1997

Abstract

A few years ago Peter Redgrove published an article called "Why the Bomb is Real but not True",¹ in which he argued that nuclear weapons and the ethics of modern warfare are made possible by a model of scientific thought which holds as an axiom that the thinker's subjectivity must be rigorously excluded. He calls this a "monstrous cosmic detachment … which is held to describe the ground of our universe, and modern behaviour,"² and points out that an alternative model has been proposed, based on the so-called "holographic paradigm", of a world the whole of which (including our own subjectivities) is "enfolded" like the parts of a holographic image into each region. The word "enfolded" comes from the physicist David Bohm's book Wholeness and the Implicate Order; Redgrove cites Bohm's hypothesis of an "implicate order [in which] one may say that everything is folded into everything" in contrast to "the explicate order now dominant in physics in which things are unfolded in the sense that each thing lies only in its own particular region of space (and time) and outside the regions belonging to other things."³

Cited authors

Bohm David